Wiktory, Garden

[akirlu]

I have been wanting to get our yard under human control for a while now. With a long, cool, wet spring, the lawn has gone mad with euphoria and little opportunity to check it. I've also been wanting to plant some vegetables and flowers and berries and such, but every time I get up a head of steam I am defeated by the prospect of digging in the alluvial rock suspension that is our soil. All too many nursery plants have died in their containers, waiting for me to make a hole.

But a little squib in the current issue of This Old House gave me a new shot of hope. It was a piece about a woman in Portland who had converted her lawn into a market garden without getting rid of the sod, by using "lasagna" gardening. Could it be that I could plant things without having to excavate the rocks first? Maybe so. Last Sunday I found a copy of Weedless Gardening at Elliot Bay Books, and have been mining it all week for techniques. It really is supposed to be no-dig gardening.

So I cadged some newspapers off freecycle, and today I did battle with the grass in the small plot next to our deck. Cut it, flattened it, fertilized it, laid out newspaper on top of the sod, wet it, piled lawn clippings and pulled weeds and trimmings on top of that, and then finally three cubic yards of steer manure on top of that. After that I wet it all down good, got some bark to mulch the paths between the beds, and poked a bunch of vegetable starts into the beds. Poked in some seeds, too. By golly, it looks kinda like a garden. Like, on purpose and stuff.

All in all it took me about 6 hours this afternoon, so not "no work", but way less work than clearing the same space would have taken if I had cut the sod and tilled the earth to get a garden. Now we get to wait and see how my garden grows.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, we'll see how it goes -- it's an experiment at this stage. But the Weedless Gardening guy says you can go straight to planting. At the very least, it will be a kickass planting bed for next year.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Depending on the area involved, 3 cu. yds of (even aged/composted) manure might be a bit much for immediate planting -- rule of thumb says about one inch deep gives plenty of nitrogen, & about as much as most plants can handle. If all else fails, the area should be great for planting next spring, especially with more newspaper, grass clippings , and leaves piled on in the autumn. (Don't even think about seeding carrots for at least a year -- the nitrogen causes thin & much-branched roots, I say from recent experience.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, it is composted manure, but thanks for the warning. As you say, at the very least it should be good prep for next year, and we'll see how it goes this year. I'm thinking I may pick up some straw bales for the other side of the yard -- apparently you can plant right into the bale, too. I'm just looking for ways not to have to dig in this yard.

[cschells.livejournal.com]

I envy your yard's lush greenness! I'm reclaiming parts of our front lawn little by little using this method. It seems to work best with little tiny plants or seeds the first time around. Eventually, if you want to plant bigger stuff, you'll have to do the digging, but at least the grass will be gone. I think planting veggies on top is the smartest--I tried to put some lantana in 6" pots in last year and they didn't grow until I took them back out many months later and dug real holes for them. I have a volunteer cucumber plant right in the middle of them now, though, that's growing like gangbusters, so I decided to plant pumpkins and green beans in my latest little patch and they're very happy.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, lush greenness, it's a Seattle thing. It's the payoff for rain ten months out of twelve. The sheer fecundity is almost shocking. Especially if you've spent a few decades acclimating to LA. Here, stuff just grows. It grows in the damnedest places, often just because no one has come along and ripped it out yet. Ferns and clover and blackberry brambles and wildflowers crop up wherever a little dirt accumulates: in cracks in the sidewalk, on sheltered concrete ledges, in the verges of every highway and path. Blackberries are famously a weed. Moss of course grows on every imaginable surface including vertical ones. People take to keeping goats in order to keep their yards in check. And all without watering, or at most, watering only in July and August. In Los Angeles, green takes effort and care. Here it just happens. It's why here, I may have a hope in hell of keeping a garden.

You're right of course that I'll have to do some digging eventually, especially to plant shrubs and trees, but possibly not as much as I would without the lasagna gardening techniques.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I just put the book on hold at the library. It sounds like a promising approach.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I expect to update as things progress. Or don't.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Faced with your conditions -- a rocky alluvial fan -- I'd probably develop a detailed system for digging down at least a foot, screening through 1-inch mesh, using the removed larger rocks to build a wall (or house), and... errr... never get around to actually accomplishing anything useful. Given your disinclination to be a Rock Miner, yes, something on the order of raised-bed gardening, or raising the soil level of the entire area, seems to be the practical solution. For most vegetable & annual flowers, a foot (or even just 8 inches) of topsoil is adequate, and deep-rooted plants will eventually penetrate into the substrate quite well.

The technique you're using is a sub-set of what used to be called "sheet-composting". It's a valid way of improving soil, but some caveats may be in order. Unlike traditional "batch-composting", it doesn't create enough heat to destroy (most) weed-seeds and pathogens. Depending on how finely the material is chopped, it's more likely to harbor lots of pillbugs, sowbugs, earwigs, centipedes, slugs, and snails (though only the last two are generally serious pests). And it's much slower than a dedicated compost pile -- it'll probably take almost a year to reduce c. 90% and become useful compost, whereas a pile does this in about two months (in warm weather). (Yes, a foot-deep layer of mixed oganic/plant material (except for largish wood chips) probably will sink down to about an inch-thick layer in a year... and to a fraction of that in another year. Your average temperature isn't as high as that in the Los Angeles area, but remaining constantly moist also speeds the breaking-down, so our differences balance out.)

One point that needs to be kept in mind is that you're not trying to improve soil (which adding a substantial amount of organic material does), you're trying to _create_ a layer of soil 8 inches to a foot deep, on top of the rocky substrate. To do this in what I'd consider a reasonable time-frame (on the order of three years), it'll probably be necessary to import a one-time load of 4 to 6 inches of loam, silt, or fine-sand topsoil, in addition to the (at least annual) applications of large amounts of organic material.

Or you could just do as much as you feel like doing, and let whatever happens happen. Which is about what I do, most of the time; it's just that when it comes to gardening I seem to have an obsessive-compulsive Thing about the Importance of improving soil.